Last issue was about keeping a record of what changes on your site. This one is about the part of your site you've quietly stopped reading: the contact form entries.

Here's how it goes wrong. Spam creeps up. First it's a handful a week, then a few a day, then your entries screen is mostly Cyrillic blocks, Telegram handles and consonant soup. And because a human can only skim so many times before switching off, the real cost lands eventually: a genuine enquiry goes unanswered because it looked like the other forty. That's not an inbox-hygiene problem, that's lost revenue.

The two usual fixes both make things worse. Turning up the CAPTCHA blocks real people — every extra hurdle costs you conversions, and the people most likely to bounce are the ones on a phone with a poor connection who were about to become customers. And bulk-deleting everything older than a month is fast right up until the day it eats a lead.

This week's fix: filter carefully, delete recoverably

Three principles, and they hold whatever tool you use.

One: only inspect fields where gibberish is actually meaningful. Run detection on free-text fields, and skip emails, URLs, numbers and choice fields entirely — that's where false positives come from. A surname that looks odd to a regex is not spam.

Two: preview before you act. Any bulk operation on entries should show you the candidates and the specific rule each one matched, before anything is removed. If you can't see the reason, you can't trust the rule.

Three: make deletion recoverable and self-correcting. Move flagged entries to trash rather than deleting them, and when you restore one, whitelist that sender automatically so the same false positive can never happen twice.

The tool I built for Gravity Forms

If you run Gravity Forms, I've packaged exactly this as Gravity Forms Smart Spam Cleaner — £29, one-time.

Layered detection: gibberish text (no vowels, long consonant runs, random mixed case), Cyrillic and Telegram message spam, dot-trick Gmail aliases, disposable domains, plus your own editable blocklist and whitelist.
Recoverable by default: cleanups move entries to the Gravity Forms Trash, restorable in one click for around 30 days — and restoring whitelists the sender automatically.
Scheduled cleanup: hourly, twice daily, daily or weekly, with a summary email after each run telling you what was removed and why.
Blocking at submission: flag spam the moment it arrives so it never triggers a notification or reaches your entries at all — logged for review either way.
Multi-form: clean several forms in one pass, each with its own email-field override, with a full audit trail of manual, scheduled and blocked events.

It needs WordPress 5.4+, Gravity Forms 2.4+ and PHP 7.4+. Updates and support are included, and there's a 14-day no-questions refund.

Do this bit even if you never buy anything

Go and open your form entries right now and read the last thirty properly — not skim, read. If there's a real enquiry in there that you missed, you've just found the business case, and it's a bigger number than any plugin costs. If there isn't, you've confirmed your filtering is fine, which is worth knowing too.

This issue lives in the archive, organised by topic. And the plugins page shows the repeatable workflows alongside the service work.

How we can work together

Reply with a rough count of how much spam a week your main form gets, and I'll tell you whether it's a filtering problem or a form-design problem.